Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. It is one of all of our favorite things, where we look at all that “stuff” that’s integral to Christianity but that does not fit into a materialist worldview, because that worldview—is garbage. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and my co-host is Fr. Stephen De Young, who’s with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and if you’re listening to us live you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi, who is just back from COVID-land, yay! will be taking your calls tonight. We will get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

So. In our last two episodes, we talked about sacred geography: how the reality of sacred spiritual place overlaps material place, including paradise, which is the mountain of God; and last time we talked about the underworld. This episode is titled “The Lord of Spirits Goes to Hell,” which some people apparently thought was a repeat of last time, but it is not! We are talking about what happens when the Lord of Spirits himself, that is, the incarnate Son and Word of God, Jesus Christ, makes the journey into the underworld. That journey is a major theme of the Holy Week and Pascha services that for the Orthodox Church are coming up this very next week in real time, so this is also our Holy Week and Pascha special. I feel like we should call it our season finale, but we’re not stopping!

So to begin our journey tonight, we’re going to do what we almost always do. We’re going to take a trip back thousands of years, and we’re going to arrive at an ancient ruined city in the Levant, in northwestern Syria, near the modern city of Latakia. That’s right, we’re heading back to Ugarit, and that means we’re going to be talking about our old adversary, Baal. So, Fr. Stephen, take us to Ugarit.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Ugarit, you-betcha!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the tourism slogan that we’re establishing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right? For people from the upper Midwest?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Say yes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yah, sure. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, as you said, this is a city that has not been around in a long, long time.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like 4,000 years, roughly? Or more than 5,000? 3,000? Whatever.

Fr. Stephen: No, it hasn’t been around—yeah, for about 3200, roughly, give or take. But before that it was around for a long time. Ugarit was originally built—settled, I should say—around… Well, it was early in the Neolithic period; we won’t get into that again. The walls seem to have been built around 6,000 BC.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow. So it was pretty old.

Fr. Stephen: And again, if these dates are problematic to you, adjust however you need to, but that’s the current archaeological dating of when the walls were built. Then Ugarit was destroyed circa 1180 BC. So this is a city that existed for thousands of years, but thousands of years thousands of years ago. And it wasn’t rebuilt; it was pretty much plowed over, and it was not discovered until the middle of the 20th century, that the city was even there.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Now, were there indications? Did people know that it had existed; they just didn’t know where it was? Some kind of records, or…?

Fr. Stephen: Not really.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow.

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s in an area that’s now called Ras Shamra, and when it was found, a new language was discovered and named Ugaritic, because… Ugarit. [Laughter] Which is a northwestern Semitic language, meaning it’s sort of a close cousin to Hebrew. It’s another one of the dialects that emerged from Old Canaanite around the time that the city was being destroyed, actually. But unlike biblical Hebrew, it’s not written with the Phoenician alphabetic script; it was written with the cuneiform script that’s used for Akkadian and other early Semitic languages. So phonetically, like if you read it in transliteration and you know Hebrew… Well, if you’ve studied any Semitic languages, even Arabic, even modern Arabic, you know basically the consonantal structure of most of the vocabulary. So the differences between Semitic languages are mostly vocalization and vowels. So in transliteration, if you’re good with Hebrew and Aramaic, you can pick up Ugaritic really quickly. To read it in the cuneiform script, you have to learn the cuneiform script, which is a lot more difficult, I can say from first-hand attempts. [Laughter] Because you’ve got a couple hundred symbols to learn, not like 22 letters.

Fr. Andrew: I remember when I was a pre-teen, seeing that alphabet and going: “That’s really cool,” and then learning three symbols and then giving up.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and they all look fairly similar. They’re not radically different from one another.

But the reason the language was so important is there were literally a ton of Hebrew words that we did not know what they meant, because the only texts we had them in were sort of scattered parts of the Hebrew Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they just made guesses when they would translate.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s why sometimes if you compare any of the modern translations in the Old Testament to parts of, like, the King James Version, you’ll see that they are sometimes radically different, and you’re like: “What is happening there?” And it’s because the King James translators were doing their best. They were looking at the Latin and looking at the Greek and kind of going… [Confused groaning] And there are places even in the Greek translation where you could tell the rabbis century later were kind of looking at it and going… [Confused groaning] and kind of approximating.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right. Is that where we get the donkey-centaurs? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Sort of, yes, actually.

Fr. Andrew: I’m just going to throw that out there for people: donkey-centaurs.

Fr. Stephen: That’s a topic for another time, probably when we talk about vampires, just to further tease it. [Laughter] But, yeah, that’s where you get a lot of weird things. You get the edge of the bed of Damascus versus a lion cub in one place. There’s a lot of really interesting things inside of those. But we found these same words, albeit vocalized a little differently, in these Ugaritic texts, and so that gave us a few dozen more examples of vocabulary usage.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s piles and piles of clay tablets, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, because all this is written on fired clay tablets, but these fired clay tablets from the Ancient Near East, once they fired them, they’re almost indestructible. Like, if you hurled them at your floor, you’d dent your floor before you’d break the tablet.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! That’s… really convenient.

Fr. Stephen: That’s why we have so many.

Fr. Andrew: But I guess most of them are useless. Most of them are, like, shopping lists and whatever, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so if… There are several places, O listener, if you want to study further—there are several places where you could get a full ride to get a PhD in Sumeriology in the United States.

Fr. Andrew: People writing this down right now, I can tell.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there are endowments and stuff for people to translate all this stuff, and there aren’t enough people to do it. Part of it is that you end up translating a hundred grocery lists and trade documents before you get to something interesting, but they’re still turning up interesting things. A few years ago—I mean, five or ten years ago—they discovered a whole new version of the flood story on a Babylonian tablet.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, nice!

Fr. Stephen: So this stuff… There is interesting stuff there; you’ve just got to be willing to get into the weeds and to learn cuneiform and do some language study.

But so the reason we’re talking about this is one set of tablets in particular that was found.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s not just relevant to biblical studies, but there’s also…

Fr. Stephen: Broadly.

Fr. Andrew: Broadly, right, but there’s also—

Fr. Stephen: Specifically. One of those has been named—by us—the Baal cycle. “Cycle” because it’s like an epic cycle; it’s like an epic poetry cycle, and “Baal” because he’s the main character. All through the Old Testament we see Baal worshipers, prophets of Baal, altars built to Baal. They’re kind of the bad guys through most of the books of the kingdoms, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. You see them turn up in the prophets.

So we knew about Baal. We knew, for example, Queen Jezebel who marries King Ahab in the northern kingdom of Israel is from the Phoenician kingdom, which is in what’s now Lebanon, so we knew she brought the Baal worship down from there. So we knew this religion there, but this is the first time with these Ugaritic texts including the Baal cycle that we got sort of the other side of that, where we got texts written by Baal worshipers for Baal worshipers instead of the other, instead of condemning Baal-worship. So we’re getting to see how their religion looked from the inside. And there’s lot of ritual texts and lots of other stuff, but the Baal cycle is what we’re going to talk about tonight.

Baal himself—“Baal” is both a title and a name of a god. So the word baal or ba’al is just the word for “lord” or “master.” That creates some funny things for people who don’t know that. The founder, for example, of Kabbalistic Judaism is the Baal Shem Tov, and you’re like: “Wait. Baal!?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, a rabbi or whatever named Baal? But it just means “lord.”

Fr. Stephen: But it’s the Aramaic word for “master.” The same way that we use various versions of “master” when we address bishops, they did for rabbis in Aramaic.

There’s also a place in the minor prophets where Yahweh the God of Israel says, “Previously you knew me as ba’al, but now you know me as husband”—

Fr. Andrew: What!

Fr. Stephen: —which of course our 19th century German friends jumped all over: “Oh, see! Look!”

Fr. Andrew: Right. “They were polytheists! They worshiped Baal!”

Fr. Stephen: “They were Baal-worshipers! He’s admitting it!” But if you read it in context, it’s saying, “Previously you knew me as master; now you know me as husband.” He’s talking about the relationship with Israel, that he’s not just their lord but he also loves them and cares for them.

So, yeah, but when we talk about Baal, like when you have the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel with the Prophet Elijah, the Baal they’re worshiping is a specific guy who was just referred to as Baal, and that’s the person whom the Baal cycle is about. His father’s name is El, which is just the word for “god.”

Fr. Andrew: Which just means a god, exactly. Yeah, the most-high god is named “god,” and his son is named “lord.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. And that’s not coincidental, the idea that you have most-high god and then a son. We talked about this a little in a couple of previous episodes, but it bears repeating here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like early, early on, some of our early episodes.

Fr. Stephen: That this is a pattern you see throughout ancient religion, is that the most-high god is the father to a son, a divine son who presides over the divine council.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then that sets up in almost every single ancient mythology—not all of them, I think, but in almost every single one—what’s referred to as the succession myth, where you’ve got a son or some kind of lesser god overthrowing his father or overthrowing some greater gods. I mean, the details slide around a little bit depending on which one you’re looking at. And that’s in the Baal cycle, which until—what was it, the 1960s, 1970s?—no one had known those details for over 3,000 years.

Fr. Stephen: Right, about Baal in particular.

Fr. Andrew: About Baal specifically. Yes, you’ve got the succession myth in many mythologies, but…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’ve got Zeus killing Cronus, Cronus castrating Cronus, Odin killed his father—all the way through. So we talked about that in terms of the way the devil is portrayed in the prophets in particular in the Old Testament, that it’s sort of correcting the record that, well, yeah, you maybe tried but you didn’t succeed in making yourself the most-high god.

Fr. Andrew: Right, in pagan myths generally there’s a success that happens there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is what the story of the Baal cycle primarily is. The story of the Baal cycle is sort of… the through-line of the epic cycle is this is the story of Baal’s sort of insurrection, and his father… We talked before also how, after a certain point in history, in all of these ancient religions, all these forms of ancient religion, that the most-high god sort of recedes off into the distance. And you can really see this in the Baal cycle, because technically Baal’s revolt is to make his father, El, the most-high god and for him to preside in the council, but El doesn’t do much of anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, so Baal is actually revolting against Yam and Nahar, who are the gods of the ocean and the rivers, respectively. I think even in modern Arabic nahar means “river.” Write in and let us know if I got that wrong. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yam is the word for sea or ocean; we talked about how that’s chaos. And he’s the most-high god at the beginning of the Baal cycle; he’s the one in charge. And then Nahar is referred to as “the prince,” so he’s the one, the son who presides.

Fr. Andrew: The idea is to get a new dynasty in there, essentially.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Especially for people who have read Fr. Stephen’s blog, you might have heard some of this before, almost certainly, but there’s this very dramatic moment in the Baal cycle where Baal goes up on—is it Mount Hermon? Am I remembering that correctly?

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s not. It’s Mount Zaphon with Baal.

Fr. Andrew: Mount Zaphon, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Let’s wait and get to that in a second.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, all right. That’s fine. Don’t want to spoil it yet! Okay, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I’m just so excited!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Hold your horses, man! So one of the primary things that the Baal cycle illuminates is one of the psalms. This is Psalm 24 in the traditional Hebrew numbering, Psalm 23 in the traditional Greek numbering. Once we found the Baal cycle, we can see that this psalm, this Hebrew psalm, is sort of a response to the Baal cycle. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, it directly references it.

Fr. Stephen: One more thing about sort of the arc of the Baal cycle before we read the psalm. Just again to give the broad arc: in the broad arc of the Baal cycle, the broad arc of the action, Baal decides he’s going to take charge and put his dad in charge, so he’s going to overthrown Yam and Nahar. So he sets out to stage this sort of rebellion, and he totally wins, by a lot, but decides to go to the underworld, after he totally wins.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and get some real estate there.

Fr. Stephen: And when he goes into the underworld, he runs into Mot, the god of death, whom we’re going to be seeing a lot of tonight, and gets in a fight with Mot which he also totally wins, but even though he totally wins, he decides to stay in Sheol and take up residence there. So that’s sort of the broad strokes of the story that the Baal-worshipers were telling themselves in their pro-devil propaganda. So now let’s go ahead and look at the psalm.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’re starting to give it away now! So this is Psalm 24. People, you should recognize a lot of this, but I’m just going to read the whole psalm to you; it’s only ten verses long. Psalm 24:

The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,
   the world and they that dwell therein;
For he hath founded it upon the seas,
   and established it upon the floods.
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?
   or who shall stand in his holy place?
He that hath clean hands and a pure heart;
   who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive the blessing from the Lord,
   and righteousness from the God of his salvation.
This is the generation of them that seek him,
   that seek thy face, O Jacob.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates;
   and be lift up, ye everlasting doors;
   and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
   The Lord strong and mighty,
   the Lord mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates;
   even lift them up, ye everlasting doors;
   and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
   The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.

Okay, everybody, you, especially if you’re Orthodox, you’ve heard this psalm; you’ve definitely heard it. But if you’re a Christian, if you read the Bible at all, this is a psalm you should know. It’s Psalm 24. All right, well, let’s talk about all the cool things that are happening in this psalm with regards to the Baal cycle. It’s just unbelievable. You guys are not going to believe it. You’re not going to believe it, even if you’ve read the relevant post from Fr. Stephen’s blog, which talks about some of this; it doesn’t talk about all of it. But let’s talk about a lot more of it. So, verse one!

Fr. Stephen: So you read the King James Version—

Fr. Andrew: The King James, yes.

Fr. Stephen: —which is good enough for the Apostle Paul, it’s good enough for us.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? [Laughter] There’s someone out there, by the way, who doesn’t like it when I say, “Right!?” I feel like I’m going to say it a lot more tonight.

Fr. Stephen: Probably.

Fr. Andrew: Just to mess with that guy. [Laughter] Anyway, verse one: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

Fr. Stephen: Such ressentiment is not appropriate for Lent, I feel. With all due respect.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, that’s true. I’m getting a little punchy here at the end of the sixth week of Lent. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So I mention that because there are some things that are kind of obscured by English translation. This isn’t so much mistranslated as just sort of obscured. One of the big ones right off the bat is that English Bibles, by and large, with some exceptions, don’t translate “Yahweh” as “Yahweh.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s usually “Lord.”

Fr. Stephen: But “LORD” in all caps.

Fr. Andrew: All caps, yeah. So you get: “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof,” but it’s really: “The earth is Yahweh’s and the fullness thereof.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and why I’m saying that’s important is that sometimes what the text is saying—and we’re going to see this over and over again tonight—sometimes what the text is directly asserting is that things that the pagan nations were saying about their gods are actually true of Yahweh, the God of Israel, and not of those pagan gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s a lot of smack-talk, really, going on in the Bible, frankly. Like, “No! Not your guy! No!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if you don’t translate that, the name, then you kind of lose on that. You lose out on that idea. So if you’re saying, “No, Charles is king,” as opposed to somebody else—he’s king, not this other guy—whereas if you just say, “No, the king is king!” you don’t get the… “No, this is the right [person].” So that begins right away in verse one, where it says, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” It’s: “The earth is Yahweh’s and the fullness thereof.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it doesn’t mean anything.

Fr. Stephen: “The world and they that dwell therein,” meaning the world, the creation, the cosmos, and everything in it, belongs to Yahweh, not to anyone else. He’s placing a claim, a personal claim on it. That’s why I think that it’s appropriate here to point out the personal name.

Eagle-eared—that’s not a phrase. What would be ears? Eagle-eyed, what’s the ear equivalent? “Dog-eared” doesn’t work.

Fr. Andrew: Rat… I don’t know. There’s a lot of animals that have good hearing.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes. Attentive listeners amongst our listeners, who have been to an Orthodox funeral service, might recognize that verse.

Fr. Andrew: That’s said right when the priest anoints the body with oil and probably puts some ash or dirt, depending on the tradition. It’s usually done right at the end of the funeral service, or sometimes it’s done right before the burial.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right before the burial, right before the casket is sealed and the burial takes place.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the round world and all they that dwell therein.” That’s the version that’s in my head, anyway.

Fr. Stephen: And just hearing that in English, it might not be clear what any of that has to do with the fact that you’re burying somebody.

Fr. Andrew: Right, except maybe it has something to do with dirt?

Fr. Stephen: You’re putting them in the earth, I guess? But the point here, once we understand what the verse is doing—it’s saying that the cosmos and everyone in it, every sentient being in it, belongs to Yahweh and no one else—then you understand that when we do this in the funeral service, we’re asserting a claim.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that this person is not being handed over to the god of death; this person belongs to Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Even though he’s about to go into the earth, he still belongs to Yahweh; he still belongs to the one true God. So that’s where it starts. Right off the bat, shots fired, that, no, all of this belongs to Yahweh and no one else.

Verse two starts with “For.” It’s because. Why? Why does it all belong to him? Because he founded it; he built it, so it’s his; he made it. And he did that by founding it upon the seas, which is—

Fr. Andrew: Yam.

Fr. Stephen: It’s the word yam. And “established it upon the floods” is how the King James does it, and “floods” is nahar.

Fr. Andrew: What do you know.

Fr. Stephen: So he built it on top of Yam and Nahar.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is basically saying— Remember now, Baal now is going up against Yam and Nahar to try to defeat them so he can set his dad and himself up as the new dynasty up on the mountain. But what God is saying here, through this psalm prophetically, is: No, no, no, no. I’m the one who conquered the chaos of the oceans and the seas and the rivers, and I built my world on top of them, which is… You’ve got that sort of image of submission and defeat. Just like if you level a city and then build your new city up on top of it, that’s what’s going on here. So again, it’s a comment on the Baal cycle.

Fr. Stephen: If you want power over chaos, he didn’t have to defeat it and fight it. The image is of him laying the foundation of a building on the ocean. So this is… You get this same kind of imagery in the book of Revelation at the end: the sea like glass.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it just obeys him.

Fr. Stephen: It’s just flat, like solid, instead of chaotic and choppy and out of control. So it all belongs to Yahweh the God of Israel because he created it and he subjected the forces of chaos to order when he created it, as we saw when we talked about Genesis 1 at a couple of points.

So then, verse three, the smack-talk continues. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “The smack-talk continues.”

Fr. Stephen: Because it says; it asks the rhetorical question, “Who shall ascend the”—literally mountain—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not the hill.

Fr. Stephen: “Who will ascend the mountain of Yahweh?” This is the Har Mo’ed. This is the mountain, the paradise that we talked about, the mount of assembly, the place where everyone meets. Who’s going to go up the mountain? “Or who shall stand in his holy place?” Right, the holy place, the holy space of paradise? Who’s going to come into paradise?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not you, buddy! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not Baal, not the devil who rebelled. He can’t go back. He’s gone; he’s thrown out. He’s done. It’s permanent. He’s in the underworld, and he’s staying there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but this is connected again, back again to the funeral, because who’s going to ascend? This person, by God’s grace, that you’re burying in the ground. They’re going to ascend the mountain of God. Baal doesn’t get to do it; this guy does.

Fr. Stephen: Verses four and five: “He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul unto vanity or sworn deceitfully.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. Faithfulness.

Fr. Stephen: “He shall receive the blessing from Yahweh, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.” So he’s the one… And that righteousness is literally he will receive justification. He’s the one who will be put in order. It’s that creation language. It’s saying wait. That Yahweh put the creation in order and restored them and built them and blessed them. He’s going to do that to this human, who does not belong to Baal, and he’s going to do it instead of Baal. So this is that replacement idea, going on and sort of being rubbed in his face. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so it’s clear then that this understanding of what this psalm is for is preserved in Orthodox liturgical practice by virtue of it being used in the funeral.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And now…

Fr. Andrew: Here we go!

Fr. Stephen: ...as we get to the last four verses, [these] are also preserved in Orthodox liturgical practice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: That’s starting in verse seven, the “Lift up ye heads, O ye gates, and be lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.” There’s this dialogue, of “Who is this King of glory?” And it’s “Yahweh, strong and might, Yahweh, mighty in battle.” Then again: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; lift them up, everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory?” Yahweh Sabaoth—that’s the Lord of hosts. Yahweh Sabaoth, Yahweh of armies, as we talked about before.

Fr. Andrew: Also known as the Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He is the King of glory. So again, the name is important. He is the King of glory, not anybody else. Not anybody else.

And so this, these verses, which seem kind of weird, taken by themselves, because gates don’t have heads, they can’t lift them, per se, or ask questions…

Fr. Andrew: And on its face it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the six verses that came before, but...

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it’s interesting sometime to go and look at some of the weird exegeses of this you get from certain sources in the early modern period, in the early modern periods of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Fr. Andrew: Our friends in other groups.

Fr. Stephen: But I’ll leave that to others. But they didn’t have the Baal cycle. And in the Baal cycle—and this is… I’ll give you the reference: so this is Baal I.II.24-29, and the way that works is that means it’s tablet one, column two, lines 24 through 29. So if you’re one of the folks out there who knows cuneiform, you can actually go look at the tablet and find this; otherwise you can find it in a critical edition with that information.

There is this episode during Baal’s rebellion in which a group of angels—it’s malach, the word for “angel,” which also means “messenger,” of course—come from Yam and Nahar, because they’ve heard rumblings that Baal is up to something. [Laughter] And Baal is sort of being a rabble-rouser on Mount Zaphon amongst the other gods and is trying to get them to join his rebellion. So these messengers come to say, “Hey, we heard there’s something brewing here. You’d better not try anything,” basically.

When they come and they enter the room, the representatives of Yam and Nahar enter the room, all of the gods who are sitting on their little thrones, they all sort of put their heads between their legs, prostrate themselves, submissive posture.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like: Don’t hurt us, we’re sorry, we’re not with that guy.

Fr. Stephen: So they all sort of wimp out, and so Baal’s standing there by himself. So then Baal has his sort of Braveheart moment where he gives his speech. He’s going to give his speech, he’s going to rally the troops, he’s going to tell the other gods, “Look, man, we can do this. They can take our lives; they’ll never take our freedom. You can’t handle the truth,” etc.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “It is not this day!”

Fr. Stephen: So he goes to give this speech, and he begins it, because they all have their heads between their legs, by saying, “Lift up your heads, O ye gods, and be ye lifted up,” as he gives this sort of rousing speech about how we’re going to Delaware and then we’re going to go to Pennsylvania, and then we’re going to go to… And then he screams. [Laughter] Anyway. There’s a reference for all the Gen Xers out there.

So these are the words with which, in the Baal cycle, Baal rallies the other gods in his rebellion to go to victory.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Lift up your heads, guys. I’ve got this.”

Fr. Stephen: And so what we see in the psalm is that Yahweh the God of Israel is throwing those words back at Baal. He’s throwing those words back at Baal/the devil who, although he totally won, twice, is for some reason down in the underworld.

Fr. Andrew: “I meant that! I meant to do that, guys!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, is throwing it back at him. He’s throwing it back in his face, the very words that he used. So then the question is: Well, why is it gates rather than gods? And this is related to a little bit of what we talked about last time, this palace in Sheol, this palace in the underworld that Baal ends up building, with the brazen gates that we talked about.

So the reason Yahweh is talking to the gates is that he’s coming in. Baal hears him knocking, and now he’s coming in! [Laughter] And as he’s coming in, he’s throwing these words back at Baal as a taunt, as mockery, as he comes to raid his palace. So when we understand that and you take the psalm as a whole, this psalm is prophesying that there’s going to come a day that those, even the dead, don’t belong to the devil; they don’t belong to Baal; they don’t belong the lord of the underworld; they don’t belong to Hades or Sheol. They still belong to Yahweh the God of Israel, and he’s going to come down there and get them. He’s going to come down there, break in, and take them, because they still belong to him.

Fr. Andrew: This is what we call the harrowing of hell.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so then… And then…

Fr. Andrew: And then…

Fr. Stephen: 1200 or so years later, it happens! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah. You know, you’ve got the god of death, the devil, laying claim to these dead people, and God’s saying, “No, actually, they’re mine. They’re totally mine.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this is then a big part of what we’re going to be celebrating as we come to the end of Holy Week, especially Holy Saturday, both in the morning and evening; we are going to be making present again—we talked about sacred time and space—the day on which this actually happened, when Christ, after his death on the cross, his soul descends into Hades and goes there to kick in the gates and get those there who belong to him and his Father and bring them out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and what’s fun is if you look at iconographic representations of this, both East and West, it is not depicted as being like a nice, gentle, peaceful action. The doors are being not just opened or whatever, but smashed open, and [in] various icons, often knocked on the ground. One of my favorite that I saw today, the doors are smashed on the ground, and there’s a demon who’s been crushed underneath it, with its legs and arms coming out, and the other demons are off to the side going: “Whoa! Whoa! Hey, what’s happening!? Oh no!”

So then if you’re Orthodox and you’ve been to Pascha, you’ve seen this. Now, it’s my understanding that not every single tradition has the one particular part we’re going to mention, but a lot of people are aware of it even if they don’t have this in their tradition. And if you’re not Orthodox, people, I’m just going to tell you this right now: Go to Pascha. You will see exactly what we’re about to talk about.

Fr. Stephen: May 1.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. May 1, late at night. Yeah, there are some poor people, they’re going to show up in the morning of May 2 and they’re going to go: “So I understand this is your Easter?” I’m like: “Um, we’re sleeping it off.”

Fr. Stephen: May 1, 2021, will become March 26, 30 AD.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So everybody’s going to be outside the church. They’re going to make a procession outside the church, and there’s going to be an entrance made, and in many traditions what you’re going to see is the priest is going to go up to the door of the church and he’s going to bang on the door. Now, sometimes he does it with his fist; sometimes he does it with a hand cross—I have broken a couple of hand crosses…—and he says, “Lift up your gates, O ye princes; be lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall enter in.” And there’s a voice from inside that says, “Who is this King of glory?” Or as a good friend of mine said about 20 years ago, “Who is this cling of gory?” which I have never let him live down. I text it to him every single year. [Laughter] “Who is this King of glory?”—now, see, I’m going to mess up and say it wrong! And then the priest says, “The Lord, strong and mighty! The Lord mighty in war!” And this is done three times, and then at the very end, the priest then says, “The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory!” Or “Yahweh Sabaoth,” as it says right there in my bad version of Hebrew. “He is the King of glory!”—and then the doors are opened.

So what you get, then, is this liturgical—it’s not a re-enactment; remember what we said about ritual participation a zillion times in this show—that moment, that place, it becomes the invasion of Hades, truly. You are there. This is the Son and Word of God, the Lord of hosts himself, the Lord of spirits, invading hell, because he’s going in there to release those who are held captive by the power of death and the devil.

So this understanding was preserved in the liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church, even though probably a lot of you out there, this is the first time you’ve ever heard any of this stuff from the Baal cycle. It was new to me just a few years ago. But this understanding was preserved in liturgical practice, that these lines from this psalm are about the invasion of the realm of death by the Son of God himself to come and rescue the dead. If that doesn’t just blow you away, I don’t know what— Well, there’s a lot more to come, actually. There’s more to come! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And to put a fine point on that, if you ask any Orthodox person: Who’s the voice coming from [inside]? They would tell you: That’s the devil.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the devil.

Fr. Stephen: And what is this? Well, this is Christ kicking down the doors, and we’re quoting this psalm. So that interpretation, that context for this passage of Scripture, for Psalm 24(23), the context for that, the original ancient context for that, even though Ugarit was buried in the dirt for 3,000 years, that context was preserved in the Orthodox Church through its worship. So this is what we’re talking about—not to go all the way down this rabbit-trail, but this is an Exhibit A of what we’re talking about in the Orthodox Church when we talk about Tradition.

Tradition isn’t like some additional information that’s not in the Bible that we added to the Bible. It’s not just sort of folk customs that accumulated along the route of history. When we talk about holy Tradition, we’re talking about the way in which the worship, the practice, the theology—all of this—of the Orthodox Church has preserved the original context of the Scriptures, the original context of the belief of the apostles and of the prophets and the authors of Scripture and of generations past. And this is Exhibit A of it, because about the only case where you could get the original context until we dug up Ugarit was the Orthodox Church, and most people who encountered it in the Orthodox Church until we uncovered Ugarit just thought, “Well, that’s a weird allegorical interpretation or something.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. So that’s the first half of the show; we’ve got two more halves to go. Well, let’s have a break, and let’s hear from the Voice of Steve. Let’s go to break.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! This is the second half of the show, and it’s where we begin to take your calls. Just like the Voice of Steve just said, you can reach us at 855-AF-RADIO, or 855-237-2346. It looks like we actually have a couple calls coming in here. Oh! Actually the person I was going to take just disappeared off the call board. All right, well, try to call back and we’d love to hear from you.

All right, so just to recap, we were just talking about Psalm 24 in the first half, and about how it is basically a whole bunch of smack-talk against Baal-worship, because ancient Israel was surrounded by Baal-worshipers, and occasionally Baal-worship even invaded the life of the people of Israel; some of them began to worship Baal, so Baal was definitely a going concern in that time and place.

All right, well, let’s go ahead and take a call. It looks like we have Eugene calling, and if I remember correctly, you’re somewhere in the upper Midwest; isn’t that right?

Eugene: Yeah, sure, you betcha!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There it is! You ready to take your trip to Ugarit?

Eugene: Oh yah! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh yah! So, Eugene… What is it you’ve got for us tonight, Eugene?

Eugene: Well, first I’ve just got to say I’m very glad to be calling in to the Amon Sûl live call-in program.

Fr. Andrew: Uh-huh, sure. Let’s cut this guy off right now! [Laughter] Just kidding! Just kidding, just kidding!

Fr. Stephen: Is this the token Tolkien call?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, this is the guy who says that they’re the same podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Eugene: I mean, you’ve already referenced it a couple of times this episode.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Eugene: Anyway, so, you know, sometimes when you’re talking to Protestants about the harrowing of Hades, they will say that it’s not anywhere in the Bible, and you guys have already addressed this a little bit, but I think if you’re—and I know there’s a couple of references to it in the New Testament—but I think if you take the idea that you guys have been talking about, about spiritual geography, I think just the fact that Christ was buried in the ground is a biblical testimony to him entering into Hades, entering into the underworld.

Fr. Andrew: Ding! Ding! Ding! [Laughter] Yeah. I mean, notice when people go underground. That means something.

Eugene: Yeah, right.

Fr. Andrew: So is that your comment, or do you have a question in addition to that?

Eugene: I was just asking if that was correct, but I do have another question.

Fr. Andrew: You are correct!

Eugene: If I can ask another question… But if not, that’s okay.

Fr. Andrew: No, no, go ahead. Throw it out. You’re on the line, you might as well. This is your chance.

Eugene: All right. So I was explaining to someone that I know who’s Orthodox about the ritual you guys were just talking about, the knocking on the doors of the church and reading the psalm, and he hadn’t heard about it before, but he seemed to have a problem with the idea that the church becomes Hades. That’s kind of been… I mean, it’s come up in my mind, too. I’ll just listen to you guys’ input on that.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm. Well, what do you have to say about that, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the church isn’t becoming Hades. What you have is the event being collapsed. Because there’s really two parts, and the other part is also depicted in iconography, although that iconography is less common. So the common iconography of the resurrection, you have Christ’s invasion of Hades, he’s grabbing Adam and Eve, and you’ve got the Old Testament saints there and St. John the Forerunner. The other half of that is Christ then leading them into paradise. That iconography usually you’ll see like this big crew of people behind Christ, walking into a garden through a door, and Abraham will be hanging out there with a bunch of little kids representing people who died as children, and there’s a guy holding a cross—that’s St. Dismas, the wise thief—those are the people who were already in paradise. And then Christ is leading sort of everybody else into there.

So when we do that ritual on… You notice we don’t do that on Saturday morning; we do that on Saturday evening, because we’re sort of collapsing it into the second part of that event.

Fr. Andrew: Although—let me add this, though, Father—there actually are some places I understand, like in Greece, where they do that the night before. So there is a little bit of variation there.

Fr. Stephen: So they’re not collapsing them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a little bit of variation on that point.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they’re not collapsing it; they’re doing it as the entrance into Hades, whereas we’re collapsing the event when we do it on Saturday night. So the church—you’re outside and you’re in the darkness, and the church—hopefully, if the guy you told to do it does his job that year—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right!

Fr. Stephen: —is completely illumined. So you’re coming from the darkness into the light. So the part of coming into the church is the second part of that event, the coming into paradise. So when you make the procession, the procession in the darkness with just the small light of the candle is the waiting in Hades of the departed saints, which then culminates in Christ’s rescue of them and their entering into paradise, which is sort of collapsed there at the end.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So does that answer your question, Eugene?

Eugene: Yes, it does. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent. Well, thank you for calling. We are happy to hear from you, all joking aside.

Eugene: Thank you for taking my call. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: 90% of joking aside. There’s still 10% of joking.

Fr. Andrew: Most joking, yeah. [Laughter] All right, thank you. Okay, so we talked Psalm 24 last time. We talked about the invasion of Hades by Christ, and the smack-talk against Baal. So let’s move into another group of gods that we’re going to throw some more smack-down on. People sometimes are like: “How can you be so sarcastic? Is that biblical?” I’m like: Yes. They’ve got the Prophet Elias, who’s like the patron saint of sarcasm.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, there is a lot of sarcasm. Christ is actually very sarcastic on several occasions. It gets kind of neutered in the English translation, because, you know, but yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That’ll have to wait for another episode.

Fr. Stephen: Yes!

Fr. Andrew: Okay, all right. So let’s head on over to Egypt. Let’s go put the smack-down over on those guys.

Fr. Stephen: At this point we’re probably Baaled out, so—

Fr. Andrew: Boom! [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to move on now to the Egyptians, and specifically to the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15. This is the biblical Song of the Sea, not immigrant song or a sea shanty, which I guess are in with the hepcats these days—or pirate rap that was in about 15 years ago. There was a trend.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I had just blocked that out, and now you… Opening up old wounds! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You’re picturing Jamey Bennett with an eye-patch now. I know you are.

Fr. Andrew: I am! Hey, Jamey. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So Exodus 15 contains the Song of the Sea, and the reason it’s called the Song of the Sea is this is the song which we’re told the children of Israel, led by Miriam, Moses’ sister, sing after Israel has passed through—we’ll say for now—the Red Sea.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, just put a pin in that name.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. And then they sing this song of victory. And this is— while recorded in Exodus 15, this is one of the oldest… this is one of two of the oldest pieces of anything that are in the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s kind of almost in another language, isn’t it?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s in a kind of paleo-Hebrew, so it’s even hard to translate. The other very, very old one is Deuteronomy 32, and we’ve talked about Deuteronomy 32 a little bit before; we’re going to talk about it some more in a little bit, but those are the first two odes of the canon; they’re the first two biblical odes in the Orthodox Church, and they are also these sort of ancient… And when I say that—because I know we’re going to get all the angry Moses-wrote-the-Torah people showing up at my house with pitchforks and torches—so I’m not saying that Moses didn’t write the Torah, but what Moses wrote, first of all wouldn’t have been on paper; it would have been on tablets. It wouldn’t have been in Hebrew because the language didn’t exist. It would have looked a lot more like Exodus 15 and Deuteronomy 32, frankly, than the rest of the Torah. So it’s better to talk about the Mosaic origin of the Torah or Pentateuch than the Mosaic authorship, because what we have is not exactly what Moses would have written down.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because he didn’t speak that language, there wasn’t that alphabet… Like, this has been handed down through some hands before it got…

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s been translated, translated into Greek if you’re an Orthodox Christian. We give at least just as much authority to the Greek, which was a language that didn’t exist when Moses lived, as we do to any other version. So this shouldn’t be a big problem for people. And there are places where this is made plain: in the text of the Torah or Pentateuch it’ll say, “He went to this city, which used to be called this other name.” Well, that had to be written by somebody later, and it’s been updated for a later audience.

Fr. Andrew: And then the big tell is when you get to the funeral of Moses.

Fr. Stephen: Where Moses dies, yeah. And it says, “His body has not been found until this very day.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. Which, I mean, I guess you could say he was writing this prophetically, but…

Fr. Stephen: But then that makes no sense, to say his body has not been found to this very day, if he hadn’t died yet when you wrote it.

Fr. Andrew: Which day was that, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right! [Laughter] It was the day before he died. So don’t get too hung up on that. Yes, the Torah, the Pentateuch, as we have it, comes down to us from Moses, but these two pieces of the text, the one we’re going to focus on now, Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, has come down to us with little to no editing. That’s what we mean by it’s the oldest part. It hasn’t been edited, the language hasn’t been updated, the vocabulary hasn’t been updated, so much so that it’s very difficult to read and translate, and it contains words from other Semitic languages and stuff. So that’s all we mean by that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and if you happen to be listening to this in the recording, then I just suggest that you—because we’re not going to read the whole thing to you—but I just suggest you pause and then go read Exodus 15 and then come back.

Okay, welcome back! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “Good to have you back!” [Laughter] So now the other thing that’s going to have people throwing things at me. [Laughter] As we court controversy. Part of the problem in terms of interpreting this text and understanding this text is that, in our contemporary world, almost all of the literature and time and attention that’s devoted to this text is devoted to historical concerns, meaning: Did the Exodus happen? Was there really a Moses? What year did it happen? Who was the pharaoh? Where did it happen? What body of water did they cross?

Fr. Andrew: This is the stuff that is what history is now. This is the way history works now: it’s about trying to figure out what is in texts, trying to compare against archaeology. I mean, listen; we’re not saying that those are bad things to work on—I mean, we talk about archaeology; we’re looking at those details in this very show—but it’s not really what’s actually important, and it’s not really what’s being represented in the texts.

Fr. Stephen: Some of my best friends are PhDs in history. [Laughter] So we’re not out to get you. But we have to realize that what we call “history” came into existence in the 19th century in Germany. It did not exist as a discipline before that. There was something they called history, but it’s not what we call history. What we call history the Germans in the 19th century, at the beginning of the 19th century, decided that history should be approached as Visionshafte, meaning it should be approached as a science.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a kind of forensic dissection.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s a positivist… If you read anything from the 19th century, this positivist approach is everywhere. Like, you read Hodge’s Systematic Theology from Princeton, who was a Presbyterian, wrote a systematic theology: his whole introduction is about how theology is a science and if you start with the right principles derived from Scripture and follow logical inference, the findings of systematic theology are just as certain as the findings of physics or chemistry, and you’re kind of rolling your eyes. But it was the 19th century, especially 19th century Germans. They said, “We can approach this… We can know the essence of things. We can know the essence of events through the scientific method.” So you get people like Hegel and Feuerbach and Marx who say, “Hey, we can discover the laws that work themselves out in history the same way the scientists are discovering the laws of physics or the laws of nature,” that history works the same way. There’s rules and principles that we can scientifically arrive at, and that’s how we’re going to interpret history.

Fr. Andrew: There’s this sort of attempt to have a totally… the word would be “objective,” but really what that means is kind of a perspectiveless take. That’s just a contradiction in terms. But, no, the idea is: “This is what really happened. No one’s opinion about it or experience of it is what we’re discussing. We’re talking about what really happened.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, the essence of the event. And to quote Thomas Nagel of “What is it like to be a bat?” fame, “There is no view from nowhere.” There is no viewpoint that is no place. Every point is somewhere.

Fr. Andrew: This is one of the points, for instance, that our good friend, Jonathan Pageau, makes when he… Like, he has an article, which I recommend you check it out, called “Most of the Time the Earth is Flat,” and by that he does not mean that he thinks that the earth is a flat disc—sorry, flat-earthers!—what he means is that your experience of it is that it is flat, and that in your experience the sun rises. But I mean we’ve said some of this stuff before, but this is important for us to review it just a little bit because of what we’re about to talk about.

Fr. Stephen: I was just going to say, we set up for this in the last couple episodes. There is an objective historical event. We’re not in any way denying that these things really happened.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’re not solipsists.

Fr. Stephen: But—we don’t have access to the essences of things, including historical events. What we have are the record of human experience, of humans who experienced those events. And there’s an interaction between their human consciousness and the event, and the record we have is the interplay of those two things. So if the person is telling the truth about their experience, then their account is true. It doesn’t matter if we have another person talking about the same event and those things don’t match up perfectly. They can both be true; they can both be telling the truth if they’re describing their experience accurately. So this is— Go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, and that’s what the Bible is.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, a lot of you have probably heard this before, this argument talking about, for instance, the four gospels. Okay, so if you read the four gospels, you will notice that there are some details that don’t seem to exactly reconcile with each other.

Fr. Stephen: Which clearly means they’re totally made up, totally fabricated.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. Whereas what St. John Chrysostom actually says about it—actually, this is new to me; I didn’t know that he made this argument; I was so delighted to discover that he had—he basically said: Look, if there’s a conspiracy and you have a group of people that all give the exact same testimony in court and it’s exactly the same, you can tell that that is a conspiracy, that they’re lying together in the same way; but when you’ve got all these different perspectives that don’t all quite line up, of various people who witnessed the same thing and experienced the same thing, that actually is an authenticator for the truth of what actually happened.

And that is just a beautiful way of talking, of describing the problem that we’re addressing right now, because this sort of scientific method approach to history and so forth would suggest that the only true account would always perfectly line up, like you said, these sort of “laws of history” that kind of play out. But the truth is that that’s actually exactly wrong! That’s exactly wrong, that if everything lines up that’s probably an indication that a whole bunch of people are all telling the same lie. It just would never be that way. Especially if it’s like a big, traumatic or dramatic or violent event or something like that, you’re going to get very different perspectives as to what occurred.

Fr. Stephen: And let me not very humbly suggest that this is the Orthodox answer to the great impasse of Old Testament studies. The 19th century ruined the Old Testament studies, because with this new positivist definition of history and understanding of history, what you got was very quickly our German liberal friends who had come up with this idea of history start applying it to the Old Testament, and they say, “Okay, well, we have these written documents and, yes, those are evidence, but those are evidence from one perspective, therefore they aren’t the essence of the events; they aren’t the reality of the events. So we’re going to now construct our laws of history, and we’re going to go and we’re going to do archaeology, and we’re going to gather all the other evidence we can find—documents from surrounding cultures—and we’re going to reconstruct what actually happened, and if that conflicts with what the Bible says, then we just say, well, the Bible’s got it wrong or the Bible’s biased or the Bible doesn’t have the truth.” So that’s their approach.

So to this day, if you go to a biblical studies conference, you’ll have people who go to the book of Joshua and say, “Well, look, this is just Israelite propaganda. None of this happened, and we’re going to reconstruct what actually happened, and since we accept as a base the Marxist laws of history, that all of history up until the 19th century was the history of class struggle, that that’s what’s going on here, and there was really a Canaanite peasant revolt, led by some escaped Egyptian slaves. That’s what really happened, and then that was later mythologized by the Israelites into the book of Joshua.” That’s, to this day, a very common view of what’s going on with Joshua in academia right now.

In reaction to that, your conservative Old Testament folks, mostly conservative Protestants, reacted to the exact opposite extreme. They didn’t reject that definition of history; they accepted that definition of history. They just said, “No, what the Bible records is the literal, actual essence of historical events, with no bias and no perspective whatsoever. So it happened exactly as it says.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is why, then, you get… Okay, so we’re actually about to start talking about the crossing of the Red Sea, where you then get people coming up with theories about strong winds and all of this kind of stuff to try to figure out the physics of how this worked.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so when they do archaeology, you’ve got the Bible—King James Bible—in one hand and a spade in the other hand, and you’re out there trying to prove… “I’m going to prove that this is literally, exactly true.”

Fr. Andrew: Well, if it’s the King James Bible, I mean…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So—and this is the impasse Old Testament studies has been at for 150 years. I think there’s a very Orthodox way right through it, which is to understand that we don’t know the essences of events, and we can’t know them, especially events in the distant past. I mean, Aristotle could have told you this, too. But we know how those events appeared to the people who experienced them. That’s what we have access to. And we have particular accounts to those experiences, which are authoritative and which have been handed down to us.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that especially as Orthodox Christians, we believe that the Holy Spirit had something to do with that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we seek to share the experience of the people who experienced God directly in these events, not to get at some reality that lies behind the experience.

Fr. Andrew: Now, that might seem like a long sort of rabbit-trail or whatever to go down, but it’s… Well, number one, this is kind of one of our over-arching themes for this whole podcast, but in particular for tonight, since we’re about to start talking about the crossing of the Red Sea, it’s really important so that you know that what we’re about to talk about is the experience of the people who were there and how they recorded it and how that was then handed on within the context of the people of God as guided by the Holy Spirit, God himself. That’s what we’re talking about.

Okay, well, let’s… Shall we talk about why “Red Sea” is not the name?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not the Red Sea, everybody! Well, it’s the Red Sea, but it’s not the Red Sea.

Fr. Stephen: Well, it sort of is the Red Sea, yeah. So it was the Greeks who started calling it the Red Sea; we’ll start there. So the name “Red Sea” would have meant nothing to Moses or the Israelites or the Egyptians. That’s not what they called it; that’s what the Greeks called it. So when the Septuagint gets translated, which is the Torah in Greek, they said, “What body of water is this? Oh, that’s the Red Sea,” so they translated it as “Red Sea.” That gets into English Bibles because, as we were talking about earlier, the King James translators, for example, were kind of scratching their head at the Hebrew, saying, “What body of water is this?” They looked at the Greek, they looked at the Latin, they said, “Oh! The Red Sea. We know where that is.” So they carried that over into English.

In terms of colors, we’ll do a call-back to our friend the mantis shrimp. The Egyptians not only didn’t refer to it as the Red Sea, but they referred to all big bodies of water as “the great green.” That’s what the Egyptian literally means: “the great green,” because they didn’t see blue.

Fr. Andrew: They couldn’t see blue!

Fr. Stephen: There’s our call-back. But so, they referred to the Mediterranean as the great green to the north, the great green of the north.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because they’re in Egypt.

Fr. Stephen: And they referred to what the Greeks called the Red Sea as the great green of the east.

Fr. Andrew: Which I feel like that should be a 1950s super-hero exclamation. “Great green of the east, Batman!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah. Everybody had one. “Great Caesar’s ghost” was a good one. Did Caesar’s ghost just appear to newspaper editors at random? Like, how does that work?

Fr. Andrew: That’s another episode! [Laughter] “Great green of the east!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, with Caesar and nephilim. Is that what’s going on? Anyway.

Now, what’s actually there in the Hebrew is Yam Suph, which… This is one of those tidbits that people pick up off of Bible documentaries. There’s a few tidbits that people get, and then sometimes, depending on what they do with them, cause people great consternation, like they hear that Satan is a title, not a name, or something, and then they go start bothering people on Twitter. But in this case, Yam Suph means sea of reeds is what you’ll usually hear—which is not wrong, as we’re about to talk about. But, although it does mean sea of reeds—suph can mean “reeds”—the earlier meaning of the word suph, if you go back further into the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, suph meant the end, or the extremity, or the border, or the edge, sort of the extreme part.

So in that context, it would have meant something like the sea at the end, the end sea or the border sea. And that makes sense for that same rough body of water, because it’s at the eastern border of Egypt; it sort of marked off the eastern border. To get even more specific about the body of water, thanks to The Google and The Google Earths, we’ve now seen from satellite imagery that in ancient times there were a series of locks connected to the… what we now call the Red Sea.

Fr. Andrew: Right, to control the flow of water, which [was] super important. You know, if flooding is a key part of your agriculture, which in Egypt in the ancient world it definitely was…. So, yeah, right, it’s this border water that’s got a series of locks.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this sea of the end. So anybody exiting Egypt and heading east is going to have to cross through these, this system of locks, in order to get out. They’re going to have to move through them.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, what’s interesting then is most people, when they think about the crossing of the Red Sea, they have one of two images in their head. One of them has Charlton Heston; the other one is probably the animated film about Moses. And it’s the people of Israel all running away from pharaoh and his soldiers so that they don’t get killed, and they cross it, and then it comes in on pharaoh and his soldiers and they all die. And weirdly then, Exodus, then, the Song of the Sea, depicts the whole thing as being a battle. So what’s going on there? What’s that all about? Wait, it’s not a battle! I thought it was a last desperate escape, that they got away just in time! They didn’t actually fight the Egyptians!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is part of the fall-out, I think, of that whole impasse and debate we were talking about, is that it becomes about: Well, did this miracle happen? “This is this miraculous, absurd thing that we modern science people can’t believe.” And then other people react and say, “No! We must believe that this literally happened like this, this miracle.” But that’s not how the Song of the Sea sees it. It’s not just like: Wow, God did this cool thing with the water, and there was a whale swimming around inside the water-wall and all that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which—I mean, that’s cool! I love those. You know, it’s pretty neat, Cecil B. DeMille and all that.

Fr. Stephen: But that’s not the focus of the Song of the Sea. The Song of the Sea is Yahweh just laid the smack-down on pharaoh and his army, at all.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and because God telegraphed this move. At the beginning of this whole incident, God says, “I am now judging the gods of Egypt.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s what he says he’s doing at the Passover, which is what leads to the Exodus. “Now I will pass judgment.”

Fr. Andrew: That’s where the throw-down happens. “This is what I’m about to do.”

Fr. Stephen: So this is, as it’s presented in the Song of the Sea, this is… The crossing of the sea is the last battle of that war with the gods of Egypt. And that’s why, right at the beginning, in verse three, it says, “Yahweh is a man of war; Yahweh is his name,” which would make a great book title…

Fr. Andrew: Huh! “God is a man of war…” Yeah. It’s a nice book title.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll let that hang out there. Interestingly, now people find that kind of controversial, because we don’t like war. That was actually controversial in the ancient world because of the “man” part.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh!

Fr. Stephen: People are like: “Wait. Yahweh is a man? What?”

Fr. Andrew: Well… Yes!

Fr. Stephen: “Stay tuned for a later episode on the second Person of the Trinity!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Actually, yes!

Fr. Stephen: This is this sort of climactic battle, and you see that in some of the other language used also. There are repeated references to Yahweh’s right hand and strong arm.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, over and over it’s there, like verse six: “Thy right hand, O Lord, has become glorious in power; thy right hand, O Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.” By the way, that’s the verse that the priest says as he puts on his right cuff when he’s getting his vestments on. How about that!

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this language is brought up there. It’s easy to just kind of say, “Oh, that’s an allegorical thing. Most people are right-handed, so that’s your strong arm.” So it’s like, yeah, he slugged them. But this actually has a very specific Egyptian reference.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’re not just commenting using language like we used in the body episodes, everybody: “The right hand of the Lord is his strength.” That is true, but that’s not all that’s going on here, because, once again, we’re talking about divine smack-talk against demonic gods. [Laughter] So, yeah, what’s the “right hand” and “strong arm” stuff all about?

Fr. Stephen: The god of war in this period of Egyptian history is the god Montu. Montu was seen as sort of an aspect of Re, the sun god, the most-high god of the Egyptian what we would now call a pantheon, but of the Egyptian gods he was the one who, of their council of gods, he was the most-high god. And as an aspect of Re, Montu was particularly depicted as Re’s right arm. He’s Re’s right arm, and he’s the war god, their god of war.

Fr. Andrew: Right, strength, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And this became a title because in this period—I mentioned to you when we were talking about this episode that I have a 300-page book on the naming conventions of the pharaohs throughout the various periods of Egyptian history.

Fr. Andrew: I bet it is a real page-turner!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, it is.

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And one of them during this period was every pharaoh had what was called his Horus-name, because the pharaoh was seen to be a sort of incarnation or aspect of Horus, the son of Re. One of the pharaoh’s titles was “Horus of the strong arm.”

Fr. Andrew: How about that!

Fr. Stephen: So this is an important title. This is a way that the Egyptians expressed their power in war, their might in battle, the way the pharaoh himself expressed his might in battle. So we have in response Yahweh saying, “Oh yeah, I just trashed pharaoh and his armies and the Egyptian gods with my right arm.” And even centuries later, the Prophet Ezekiel is still rubbing this in.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, right, right! I love this. So it’s Ezekiel 30:21: “Son of man, I have broken the arm of pharaoh, king of Egypt, and, lo, it shall not be bound up to be healed, to put a roller to bind it, to make it strong to hold the sword.” So it’s still… the smack-talk continues. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And notice, right: The right arm is broken, can’t hold a sword, can’t make war. This is about war and about defeat.

Fr. Andrew: He’s weak.

Fr. Stephen: And we also have this referred to in the apolytikion of the resurrection in tone three, which says that the Lord has done a mighty act with his own arm, and that “own” there, this is like pointing out the name: It’s his arm that is mighty in battle, not anybody else’s.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the smack-talk continues, even now to the present day.

Fr. Stephen: Unto this very day.

Fr. Andrew: Until this very day, yes. [Laughter] And what is…? And, you know, since this is our harrowing of hell episode, what is the act that the Lord has done with his own right arm? Destroying death. That’s right, destroying death.

Fr. Stephen: But now, going a bit further… And this is about the Reed Sea.

Fr. Andrew: The Reed Sea, Yam Suph.

Fr. Stephen: Because we’ve set up the idea of sacred geography, so we’ve talked about, yes, there’s this border sea—there’s this Yam Suph; there’s this border sea that they have to cross—but we’ve also talked about how places, these material places, become, in time and space, spiritual places, spiritual geography. And there is a spiritual place called the Sea of Reeds, called the Yam Suph. This is Mkhay-u in Egyptian, and, yes, that first syllable is M-K, like Mr. Macky. [Laughter] Oh, sorry. I got ahead of myself. So the Reed Sea is the sort of Egyptian equivalent, in the Middle Kingdom—you see this in the Pyramid Texts—is the River Styx. It’s the body of water you have to cross after death to get to the place of your abode.

Fr. Andrew: And all of you Symbolic World people will recognize, when you see some sort of border with water on it, you should be thinking about entering into a realm of chaos and death. That’s just the margin, right? The margin.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if you can get past this watery body, this Sea of Reeds, then you’ll get to the other side, and you’ll have this shadowy existence in the presence of the Egyptian gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just like in Greek mythology!

Fr. Stephen: And so the Pyramid Texts are burial texts, with spells and invocations and that kind of thing, to help get the spirits and the gods to guide the ka, the soul of the departed person, through the Sea of Reeds to the other side, safely. If you don’t—this is where I got ahead of myself—if you don’t, you become one of the mkhay-u. The mkhay-u are the drowned ones, is what that literally means. These are people who get tangled in the reeds and get pulled down into the Sea of Reeds and sort of lose their identity and become the drowned ones. They’re the damned for Egyptians. That’s what you don’t want to happen to you.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of… Could they be called the Dead Marshes? Just putting that out there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Why are you trying to prove that guy right?

Fr. Andrew: But I mean it’s the same…! Okay, if you don’t mind if I go there for a second, it’s the same thing! It is. It’s the same thing, so you’ve got Frodo and Sam and Gollum crossing over this marshy area, and—what do you know?—there’s dead people down there in the water, and what’s on the other side of it? Mordor, the place of death, the dark… The land that’s governed, essentially, by the local satan. I mean, yeah, obviously this is not the Tolkien podcast, but Tolkien is working in these exact same images in there. He knows this stuff! Eugene is wrong, but he’s not totally wrong. [Laughter] There are definitely touchstones between these images, that there is this sense that human beings have that there’s a watery thing that you cross over, and on the other side is the realm of death, and there’s a big, bad death god over there. That’s something that mankind has always thought in one way or another.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the whole promise of Egyptian religion, what they’re working towards as they serve their gods and do these rituals and everything, is this idea that perhaps—and especially the pharaoh has the best shot at it—of getting across the Sea of Reeds to this shadowy existence safely. And lo and behold, look what the Song of the Sea points out happened. Pharaoh and his soldiers are the drowned ones.

Fr. Andrew: The drowned ones. But wait, I thought that “all religions were just trying to get everybody to heaven. Isn’t that what they’re really all about? Aren’t they the same?”

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: No. Okay, sorry. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So the drowned ones are pharaoh and his armies, and the ones who were guided through to the other side were guided through safely to the other side to go and dwell with their god in the promised land by Yahweh. Yahweh’s the one who did that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s not… It’s important to note here that they don’t, like, take the long way around, they don’t hop over, they don’t tunnel underneath, they go through the realm of death in order to get to the other side. They go through it. That’s really important for this.

Fr. Stephen: So when we talk about Pascha, which means Passover, and passing from death to life, that’s not an allegorical thing. What they’re telling us in the Song of the Sea is the people who were there who experienced this the first time had the experience of passing through death, passing through the realm of death and being brought through safely to the other side, to new life, by Yahweh the God of Israel. And that’s the experience we’re sharing in when we celebrate Passover, when we celebrate Pascha.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Yeah, and so this stuff, then, again we’re going to connect this directly to liturgical stuff that Orthodox Christians are experiencing in the next week. Or, we do have one listener at least in Finland, who experienced it a few weeks ago. [Laughter] But anyway, next week.

So there is a canon that is the canon of Holy Saturday, so it’s first sung on Holy Friday night, during that matins service, which is what? The funeral of Christ, essentially. But then that same canon actually gets repeated during the midnight office at the paschal services, so it gets renewed. And the sixth ode, which always—I shouldn’t say always, well, yeah, it always connects thematically in one way or another with Jonah. So often the sixth ode has references to going underwater and this kind of thing, and experiencing death. In that sixth ode you’ve got this line:

The children of those who were saved hid underground the God who made the persecuting giant of old to disappear in the waves of the sea.

So that means that the Fathers who wrote these hymns deliberately picked this image of passing through the Sea of Reeds, and it describes pharaoh as a “persecuting giant of old”—comes right out and calls him a giant—“and made him disappear in the waves of the sea.” So this, this image that we’re just talking about right now, is specifically appointed in our liturgical hymns to be appropriate for the events that happen with Holy Saturday and with Pascha itself, because Pascha is Passover; it’s the Christian Passover. These things are all connected. It’s right there. And what do you know? There’s a giant right there in the midst of it, who is this demonized king, pharaoh. Down, down in the underground.

Fr. Stephen: Part horse, part human.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And then, of course, this is how… This is why St. Paul sees this connection between the crossing of the Red Sea and baptism, because he understands Christian baptism as dying and rising with Christ, passing from death to life in the waters, which is exactly what Exodus is talking about. There’s no allegory here. That’s what it’s talking about. So that’s why we read/chant, depending on the parts, the story of the crossing of the sea and the Song of the Sea at the baptismal liturgy on Saturday morning, when you do the whole baptismal liturgy with the 15 Old Testament readings, which I always try to schedule at least a chrismation, so that we can do that, the longer version, on Holy Saturday. And, again, this is part of that, the darkness and light imagery we were talking about earlier at the rush service on Pascha night, and this whole idea, again, of sharing this experience, of being brought through death into life on the other side.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. They’re not avoiding death; they’re passing through death, to life. It’s resurrectional. That’s what’s going on here.

So, all right. Well, that is the second half of our show, but since it’s The Lord of Spirits, there’s a third half. In our first half we talked about the invasion of Hades and the smack-talk against Baal; the second half, we talked about Passover, going through the Sea of Reeds, passing through death to life. What’s going to happen in the third half? We’ll be right back after this. Here’s the Voice of Steve.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! It’s the third half of our Holy Week and Pascha spectacular, the Harrowing of Hell here on Lord of Spirits. Wow, so that’s a lot we just went through, but we’ve got even more. But before we get to that, I actually want to mention something that I know that a lot of you have been waiting on very anxiously, and demanding pre-orders and wanting to even see if you could possibly buy the bibliography—yes, people are asking to buy the bibliography, Fr. Stephen. [Laughter]—of Fr. Stephen’s book that’s coming out in just about, God willing, in just about a week and a half. It’s supposed to come out during Bright Week. We can’t give you a precise date, but it is on track to release when it’s intended.

It’s called The Religion of the Apostles. It’s about 300 pages long. Is that right, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Give or take.

Fr. Andrew: Give or take, yeah. And it is not Lord of Spirits in print. That’s not what the book is. But, if you like this podcast, you will love the book. I know that sounds very cheesy, but it’s true, because a lot of the things that we talk about in this show Fr. Stephen has written in the book in a much more systematic kind of way, but there’s also a whole lot more in there as well. And there is, indeed, a bibliography. This is probably the question we get every single day: Can you give me a suggestion for further reading? Well, it’s going to now be there in the back of the book, and the book is indexed; it’s fully indexed. That’s a really important thing for a book like this. So, God willing, it’s going to come out, as I said, during Bright Week, and I hope everybody will order a copy, will order ten copies. We have a sort of competition going on in the Lord of Spirits Facebook discussion group, trying, attempting to try to out-buy the supply. We encourage you to do that if you possibly can, but you know we will just order up a reprint, so you will not defeat us at Ancient Faith Publishing.

Fr. Stephen: But it is very important that everyone listening right now and everyone hearing the recording contact Fr. Andrew by any means at your disposal and ask to pre-order the book, because I’ve heard they might run out. I don’t want to panic anybody, but I’ve heard….

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thanks. Thank you so much.

Fr. Stephen: No problem.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you so much for that. Well, before we get to the third half of our show, we have a question, a call coming in, from Aaron, who has a question about the Sea of Reeds. So, Aaron, are you there?

Aaron: Hi, can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits, Aaron. We are happy to have you. What is your question or comment for us tonight?

Aaron: Okay, so there is this common story with the Greeks and the Egyptians about this watery abyss that people have to travel through in order to get to wherever it is they get to. Now that Christ has raided Hades and taken all of the souls out of there, both good and bad, damned and the righteous, I want to know where we fall into that now as Orthodox. We believe that there’s this 40-day period where we pray for the soul. I wonder if there’s some kind of parallel there, this 40 days that we pray for the departed and this previous notion of having to kind of go through this intermediate phrase on our way to Hades before. And whatever the answer may be, how that applies to Orthodox and non-Christians? And what you can make of that question.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, I have some ideas, but I know that Fr. Stephen has much more coherent ideas about this, because we’ve talked about it, so I’m going to punt on over to Lafayette, Louisiana.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, well, if you were trying to get me to talk about tollhouses, you done messed up, A-aron. [Laughter] I’m not going there. I’m joking, I’m joking! I just wanted to make the joke. [Laughter]

Anyway, so, a couple things. First of all, Christ only got the righteous out of Hades. This is a place where our English translations fail us a little, because you’re probably thinking of, a lot of our hymnography will talk about, like “with himself he has raised up all the dead,” and you’re like: Well, that sounds like “all the dead”; that sounds like everybody. [Laughter] But one of the tricksy things hidden in St. Paul’s Greek is that he puts a definite article in front of the word nekros sometimes, and sometimes he doesn’t.

So when St. Paul uses the word nekros, dead, the noun “dead,” without the article, without what we would call a “the,” without an article, he’s referring to just everyone who’s dead: dead people in general. When St. Paul puts the definite article in front of it, so it’s “the dead” (capital-T, capital-D), he’s referring to departed Christians; he’s referring to the departed faithful. And he distinguishes that very carefully. So in our hymnography, when you hear stuff like “he has raised up all the dead,” it’s all The Dead, it’s all the faithful, it’s the Old Testament saints. So he brings them to paradise; the others remain in Hades.

But to the main thrust of your question—and there is no… There are theories, which I won’t go into more details on, but there is no sort 40-day journey that a soul takes on its way to paradise or Hades to await the resurrection. We know that there is a 40-day period because that’s part of the experience of the faithful that’s been handed down to us. How exactly that works, we don’t know. We probably can’t know, because you don’t know what it’s like to be a bat; you also don’t know what it’s like to be a disembodied human soul. [Laughter] And how that… I mean, our experience of time and space and everything is related to our material bodies, so without that how does that experience change? We don’t know; we’ll find out.

But that there is that period and that there is that journey, that on that journey the faithful Christians are protected and guided by their guardian angel and by angels, that there are demons involved going the other way. We have those kind of things, but there’s no sort of very firm, detailed thing related to that. Now, of course, that would mean that, in our understanding before Christ’s harrowing of Hades, everyone was going to the same place. Different parts, as we talked about last time; different parts, but the same place. And that’s why the language that you get in the Old Testament prophets is all about “the Lord will not abandon my soul to Hades or Sheol,” meaning: I’m going to go there, but even when I go there, God will still be with me and he will not leave me there, that there will be some rescue there, that prophetic element that points to the reality of the harrowing of Hades.

But so now there are different “places.” Of course, we’re using the term “place” metaphorically, because wherever Christ is, that is paradise, so when Christ is in our midst in the liturgy, that is paradise, and that means that all of the saints and all of the faithful departed are there with us.

Fr. Andrew: Does that answer your question, Aaron?

Aaron: Ehhh, it gives me a lot more questions…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, right! This is not easy stuff.

Aaron: So Baal will have a kingdom down there in his… Because when Christ returns and we’re all with him…

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, they’re going to get dumped in the lake of fire. That’s when Hades gets emptied out.

Aaron: Oh, yikes. Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: We’ll probably talk about all that horrible, horrible stuff in a future episode. We like to say that a lot, but it’s true.

Fr. Stephen: We love horrible things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, somebody’s got to talk about it. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Aaron. It was a privilege to have you on the show tonight.

Aaron: Thanks, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Good night. Well, for our third half, the smack-talk continues. [Laughter] Now, again, we’re connecting with stuff that everybody should know who’s Orthodox and goes to church at Holy Week and Pascha, because you’re going to go to every single service you can this next week. There is of course one of the very most memorable moments is the Paschal Sermon of St. John Chrysostom. As it gets towards the end, he quotes from 1 Corinthians 15:55: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” And it turns out that that actually is a quote from Hosea 13, although a little bit reworded. What’s going on there in Hosea 13 that St. Paul is quoting in 1 Corinthians 15?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, specifically Hosea 13:14.

Fr. Andrew: Verse 14, yes, that’s right.

Fr. Stephen: I think more people have read 1 Corinthians than Hosea, for some reason.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Which I… Hosea is awesome, people, by the way! It’s beautiful.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it actually is.

Fr. Andrew: It is beautiful, and not long.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So I’m going to give my own translation of Hosea 13:14, because they’re all over the place.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, I looked this up and I was like: What? What? What? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And part of this is because what we’re going to bring out tonight here in the third half, is there are a bunch of proper names, specifically proper names of, to paraphrase Winston Zeddemore, “moldy old Canaanite gods” who are mentioned here. [Laughter] So what happens is most translations you pick up are not going to translate them as the names of these Canaanite gods, but are just going to try to translate them as words. So you get a variety of interesting things.

Fr. Andrew: So, like, for instance, if my name were in an ancient text and they did that, it would not say, “Andrew Stephen,” it would say, “manly crown,” which would make no sense. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Or “the crowned man.” They would try to make sense of it, right? “The crowned man.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. “Who is this crowned man?” No, it’s Andrew Stephen. So, yeah, this is the De Young Standard Version of Hosea 13:14.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I don’t know that it’s standardized, really. [Laughter] That is the De Young Intuitive Version, provisional. I won’t stand by it. So Hosea 13:14 is roughly:

I will ransom them from the hand of Sheol. I will redeem them from Mot. O Mot, where is Deber? O Sheol, where is Qeteb? Compassion is hidden from my eyes.

And we’ll just leave it there. I think that makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That makes total sense. Everybody, good night! Okay, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so a lot of times, for example—this is similar to what we were just talking about in the Song of the Sea—that first part where it talks about “the hand of Sheol,” they’ll talk about “the power of the grave,” because they’re translating yad there (“hand”): Well, that means “might” or “power,” and “Sheol” means “the grave.” But of course Sheol is not just the grave; it’s also a place, and it’s also personified, either as a god and/or as sort of a creature with a big gaping mouth, swallowing the dead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, lots of iconography has the big mouth of hell, the hell-mouth.

Fr. Stephen: Sheol or Hades or, right, the big mouth. So this is Yahweh saying, “I will ransom them from the hand of Sheol,” so if we think about this personification, this is an actual hand, a grip. They’re being held. These people are being held by Sheol. And then in parallel with it—this is how Hebrew poetry works: you have these parallelisms—so that’s paralleled; that “ransoming them from Sheol” is paralleled with “I will redeem them from Mot,” which translated into Greek which is Thanatos, which is also the name of a god.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and for Arabic speakers, you know the word almawt? That’s “death,” but it’s not just death; it’s Mot, the god of death.

Fr. Stephen: This is the one whom Baal was tangling with early when he totally victoriously went to the underworld. [Laughter] So it’s not just that “Well, I’m going to redeem them from death in some allegorical or metaphorical sense,” but “Mot, the god of death who rules this realm, has them, and I’m going to come get them.” And so then—and this makes sense when, in the next sentence: “O Mot,” where Yahweh the God of Israel, speaks to death. Again, this isn’t an allegorical thing; he’s talking to Mot, the god of death, the lord of the dead. And he says to him, “Where is Deber?” And then he talks to Sheol and says, “O Sheol, where is Qeteb? Compassion is hidden from my eyes.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so who’s Deber, and who’s Qeteb?

Fr. Stephen: He’s asking Mot and Sheol where these other two people are, where these other two beings are.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is the part that parallels, then, 1 Corinthians 15:55, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so you see this pairing, by the way, of death and Sheol, of Thanatos and Hades, also in Revelation 6:8, the last of the four horsemen is Death, and Hades follows with him. So he’s a horseman: these are getting personified. In the inevitable four horsemen episode, we’ll talk about how all four of the four horsemen are moldy old Canaanite gods in the book of Revelation.

These two are paired there. The idea is that Death sort of feeds Hades. Hades is this creature with this maw; he’s this beast who follows Death, and Death sort of feeds people to him. He’s sort of the rancor-keeper who’s throwing the… Right?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That was unexpected!

Fr. Stephen: So he’s throwing the… He’s feeding the people.

Fr. Andrew: Boska! Who is the Jabba the Hutt in this scenario? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Baal, I guess. I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. All right, all right.

Fr. Stephen: Bib Fortuna—we won’t go there. Anyway. [Laughter] So Deber and Qeteb, then, are these servants of Mot. Deber and Qeteb are also Canaanite gods who are mentioned a whole bunch of places. When their names are translated, they’re usually translated as Pestilence and Plague, so you may already be thinking about the four horsemen again. But the idea is that these two sort of work for and accompany Mot. So Mot wants to feed Sheol, and he does that by sending his boys round, Deber and Qeteb, who are going to go out there, Plague and Pestilence, and kill people—kill people with famine, kill people with disease, kill people—then Mot gets ahold of them, feeds them to Sheol, feeds them to Hades, feeds them to hell.

And we see that accompaniment idea in Habakkuk 3:14, and I know everyone has read Habakkuk if they haven’t read Hosea. But Habakkuk 3 is actually the fourth biblical ode—we’re going through a lot of the biblical odes tonight—and in that it describes Deber and Qeteb as part of of this posse. And this wasn’t just a thing with Mot in Canaanite thinking; this was also a think with Marduk.

Fr. Andrew: And he is Babylonian.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, who is the Babylonian Baal, essentially. He’s the one who went and took out his parents and took over in the Neo-Babylonian Empire. And Marduk had Nergal; he had his posse, who went out and killed for him. But in Habakkuk 3, which is also smack-talk, it’s talking about how Yahweh actually has Deber and Qeteb in his entourage, that he’s the one; it’s Yahweh the God of Israel who has control over Pestilence and Plague.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which… And this connects us with this theme we’ve seen before, which is that these afflictions, these demonic afflictions that are loose in the world. They obviously have their own agenda, but ultimately they are, to use St. Gregory the Great’s language, “the left hand of God.” They are the… The demons, they’re doing their will, but ultimately still they’re doing the will of the Lord, who is trying to bring people to repentance. That’s the whole point.

Fr. Stephen: So none of these pagan gods could be appeased in order to protect you from plague or pestilence.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: They’re not the ones who wield them; they’re not the ones who have control over them. We also see Qeteb shows up in the second ode, the second biblical ode, in Deuteronomy 32. He shows up there with Resheph whom we’ll find out in that inevitable episode is one of the four horsemen, who is the guy who shoots arrows of plague. There’s actually a very early chthonic version of Apollo, who’s basically Resheph brought over into Greek thinking. And in Deuteronomy 32, there Qeteb is hanging out with Mot.

Fr. Andrew: How about that?

Fr. Stephen: And then these folks also show up in Psalm 91 in the Hebrew numbering of the psalms, 90 in the Greek numbering of the psalms, verses five and six, and if you’ve been to any of the great compline services in Lent or at the Orthodox Church, or if you go to sixth hour, you’ll also hear about this, both in the prayers and in the reading of the psalm. But in verse five and six, if you translate the names as names, it refers to “Deber who walks in darkness” and “Qeteb who destroys at noon.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, or as most of us have heard, “the demon who walks in darkness” and “the demon of noonday” or something like that, “the noonday demon.” And doesn’t that get read also in the funeral? Isn’t this the psalm that’s at the beginning of the funeral? That we’re actually asking God to save this person from Deber and Qeteb.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. There were in the Second Temple Period in Jerusalem—we find this for example in the Dead Sea Scrolls—there were six psalms that were considered Davidic psalms of exorcism, that David wrote to be sung over someone who was demon-possessed to exorcise them. This is the only one of them that’s a canonical psalm. The other five are not canonical. So this was an exorcism psalm from very early, and from as far back as we know, it was used as Orthodox funerals as well.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. So you’ve got exorcisms at baptism and now an exorcism again at the funeral. How about that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the reason it’s translated “demon of noonday” is that the Greek translators of what was for them Psalm 90 realized this, that these were proper names, and so they translated it. They didn’t say, “the plague that destroys at noon”; they said, “the demon who destroys at noonday, the noonday demon,” because they realized what it was referring to. And also in that psalm, that “arrows that fly by day” is a reference to Resheph again, whom we mentioned earlier—but as an aside.

But the idea here, when we piece together Habakkuk, when we look at what’s going on in Hosea, is that God has disarmed death, the god of death. These weapons that he thought he had have been taken away from him, and God now has him. So he’s literally in Hosea sort of taunting him. “Hey, Death, where’s your boy, Deber? Where is he? Oh! He’s over here with me! Where is Qeteb? Oh! He’s here with me, too!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: “You’re all alone!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and another thing I wanted to mention, as we’ve been kind of moving along this… Okay, you’ve got this line from Chrysostom’s homily where he’s quoting 1 Corinthians 15: “O death, where is thy sting? O death or O Hades or O grave or whatever, where is thy victory?” That is what this is referring to. He’s talking directly to these demons and saying that their power has been stripped from them, but at the same time there’s another liturgical connection if you understand these references to Mot, to the god of death. So if you sing the Paschal apolytikion, “Christ has risen from the dead…” If you sing it in the Greek: “Christos anesti ek nekron, thanato thanaton patisas…” That means… so we translate it as “trampling down death by death,” but a more… a clearer reading of that might be “trampling down Thanatos, the god of death, by means of death.” That’s what’s going on there, and of course if you sing it in Arabic, you’ve got “mowt al bil mowt,” so again Mot the god of death being trampled down by means of death.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the demon with the door on his face.

Fr. Andrew: Right! The demon whose face is smashed in by the door when the Lord busts his way into Hades! Right! So when you sing… So next week you’re going to sing this hymn, “Christ has risen from the dead, trampling down Death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.” When you get to that line, “trampling down Death by death,” understand what you’re singing, that Christ is smashing the god of death by means of his own death, his own entrance into Hades.

Fr. Stephen: And this idea of disarmament and stripping of power is exactly what St. Paul does with it in 1 Corinthians. And you have to understand this to understand what he’s doing, because what he says immediately after quoting Hosea is “the sting of death is the law,” which is sort of like: Wait, what? Where did that come from? Because he’s talking about the resurrection. But if you think about this, the imagery that we have here that Hosea is working with is that Death is laying claim to people through Plague and Pestilence, through his minions; he’s laying claim to people and dragging them to Hades, to Sheol. That’s what Death is doing.

So for St. Paul, how is the devil laying claim to people and dragging them into Sheol, into Hades, into death? Through sin. Through sin, through the violation of the Law. But the Law, the Torah, for St. Paul, is not evil; it’s neutral, so Christ has taken it back and has now made the commandments, has now made the Torah something that gives life instead of death. This is one of St. Paul’s ongoing themes. So he’s using it in the same disarmament sense, and then he makes that quite literally plain in Hebrews 2, if you want to read that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure. So in Hebrews 2:14:

For as much, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same, that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.

Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So, pretty direct.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right. Well, that is the third half of our show. Fr. Stephen is going to give his closing remarks, and then I have something to share with you. But before we do that, I just want to wish all of you a very, very powerful Holy Week and Pascha coming up. Our next episode, which will be again the second Thursday of May—so it’s going to be three weeks from today if you’re listening to us live—is going to be a Q&A episode, where we’re just going to hammer one question after another. Especially if you’ve called in and your question wasn’t directly applicable or we couldn’t answer it tonight, call in for that time, and we’d love to talk to you. All right, Fr. Stephen? Your final thoughts.

Fr. Stephen: Well, people may or may not have noticed I did not make as many pop song references tonight. That’s because Fr. Andrew and I had a discussion—do you remember this discussion, Fr. Andrew?

Fr. Andrew: Uh, no?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. Well, we had this discussion because I made a reference to Screaming Trees and I nearly lost you. [Laughter] So then I was like, well, can I make a Spacehog or a Helmet reference “in the meantime”? And you were like, no.

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But then you suggested that I make an Oasis reference, and I said maybe. I said maybe.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Ohh! [Sigh] Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: But, 90% of kidding aside again…

I think, though it may not seem so at first, I think an important thread running through what we talked about tonight, not directly related to Holy Week and Pascha, is the issue of what sometimes gets called the problem of evil, specifically the way it takes the form of the problem of suffering in the world. Even though we’ve talked about one element of it that we came to again tonight, the idea that these evil powers are indeed evil, but are not outside of God’s control, that God has control of them and God can ultimately use them to bring about his will and to bring about good. He can bring good out of evil; that’s what God does.

But another important aspect of that is something that we just sort of touched on when we talked about the Song of the Sea, and that’s the idea that, as Fr. Andrew said, God doesn’t take them around the sea, he doesn’t take them around death, he doesn’t just sort of swoop down and strike pharaoh and his armies dead on land, he doesn’t break all their chariots so they can’t catch up with the Israelites. He doesn’t spare them from danger; he doesn’t spare them from the experience of death. And I think often when we look at our lives and when we look at our prayer lives and when we interact with God prayerfully, we treat it as if God is supposed to spare us from sorrow and spare us from pain and spare us from death, and when these things enter our lives we act like they’re these weird foreign intruders and “why is God doing this to me?” or “why is God allowing this to happen to me?”—and we’ve got it exactly backwards, because the sorrow and suffering and pain and struggle and sin in our lives is a foreign invader to God’s creation, but it’s not a foreign invader to our lives and to our consciousness because we continually invite and bring it in and bring it about and cause it.

Where God intervenes is not to stop us from choosing it, not to stop us from bringing it into our lives, but to graciously bring us through it and out the other side, to something better. God isn’t going to stop us from suffering. He’s not going to make us immortal so we never die on this earth. He’s not going to make it so we never get sick. He’s not going to make it so we never suffer loss or hardship or any of those things. All of those things are in the world because of us, but what God is going to do, what he’s promised to do and what he is actively doing, is bringing us through all of those things and out the other side, to light and to peace and to joy and to life that is eternal with him, not to some kind of shadowy existence but to rule and reign with Christ for eternity.

So that is the promise. That is where our joy as Christians in suffering can come from. That’s why Lent is a bright struggle, not just a struggle. That’s why all of our efforts can be conducted with joy, because, as the psalm says that we read at the end of the Presanctified Liturgies we’ve been having in Lent, “Many are the tribulations of the righteous man, but the Lord will deliver him from them all.”

Fr. Andrew: Well, to close, I want to share with you one of my favorite passages of anything that I have ever read. So this comes from a text that is called the Gospel of Nicodemus. It is, as far as I know, I think it’s dated generally to the fourth century, but it comes out of traditions that are certainly older than that. And there’s a portion of the Gospel of Nicodemus that… the best way I can understand how to describe it would be that… There’s all these things that we go through together, for instance, during Holy Week, and this is what’s described in the gospels: Christ’s passion, his suffering, his death, his resurrection. Well, there’s a portion of the Gospel of Nicodemus that’s called the descent into hell, and it’s probably best described as what’s going on down in the underworld while all these other things are happening on earth.

And right before the passage that I’m about to read to you, Hell and Satan are having a conversation. We’ve been talking about a whole bunch of these various gods, so think of this as Mot and Sheol having a conversation, or Satan and Hell—however you want to talk about it; there’s just different names for these beings. And it’s being set up so that Satan is basically saying, “Hell, open up your gates, because I’m bringing Jesus in here. We got him! We finally got him!” The devil thinks he’s finally got him. So they’re having this conversation, and it’s going back and forth, and it picks up right here:

Hell answered and said, “Thou hast told me that it is he that hath taken away dead men from me, for there be many which, while they lived on the earth, have taken dead men from me, yet not by their own power but by prayer to God, and their Almighty God hath taken them from me. Who is this Jesus, which by his own word, without prayer, hath drawn dead men from me? Perchance it is he, which by the word of his command, did restore to life Lazarus, which was four-days-dead and stank and was corrupt, whom I held here dead.”

Satan, the prince of death, answered and said, “It is that same Jesus.”

When Hell heard that, he said unto him, “I abjure thee, by thy strength and mine own, that thou bring him not unto me, for at that time I, when I heard the command of his word, did quake and was overwhelmed with fear, and all my ministries with me were troubled, neither could we keep Lazarus, but he like an eagle shaking himself, leapt forth with all agility and swiftness and departed from us, and the earth also which held the body of Lazarus straightway gave him up alive. Wherefore now I know that that man which was able to do these things is a God strong in command and mighty in manhood, and that he is the Savior of mankind. And if thou bring him unto me, he will set free all that are here shut up in the hard prison and bound in the chain of their sins that cannot be broken, and will bring them unto the life of his godhead forever.”

And as Satan the prince and Hell spoke this together, suddenly there came a voice as of thunder, and a spiritual cry. “Remove, O princes, your gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in!”

When Hell heard that, he said unto Satan the prince, “Depart from me and go out of mine abode! If thou be a mighty man of war, fight thou against the King of glory? But what hast thou to do with him?” And Hell cast Satan forth out of his dwelling. Then said Hell unto his wicked ministers, “Shut ye the hard gates of brass and put on them the bars of iron and withstand stoutly, lest we that hold captivity be taken captive.”

But when all the multitude of the saints heard it, they spake with a voice of rebuking unto Hell, “Open thy gates that the King of glory might come in!” And David cried out, saying, “Did I not, when I was alive upon earth, foretell unto you: Let them give thanks unto the Lord, even his mercies and his wonders unto the children of men, who hath broken the gates of brass and smitten the bars of iron asunder? He hath taken them out of the way of their iniquity!” And thereafter, in like manner, Isaiah said, “Did not I, when I was alive upon earth, foretell unto you: The dead shall arise, and they that are in the tombs shall rise again, and they that are in the earth shall rejoice, for the dew which cometh from the Lord is their healing? And again I said: O Death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victory?”

When they heard that of Isaiah, all the saints said unto Hell, “Open thy gates. Now shalt thou be overcome and weak and without strength.” And there came a great voice as of thunder, saying, “Remove, O princes, your gates, and be ye lift up, ye doors of Hell, and the King of glory shall come in!”

And when Hell saw that they so cried out twice, he said, as if he knew it not, “Who is this King of glory?”

And David answered Hell and said, “The words of this cry do I know, for by his spirit I prophesied the same, and now I say unto thee that which I said before: The Lord, strong and mighty! The Lord mighty in battle! He is the King of glory! And: The Lord looked down from heaven, that he might hear the groanings of them that are in fetters and deliver the children of them that have been slain! And now, thou most foul and stinking Hell, open thy gates that the King of glory might come in!”

And as David thus spake unto Hell, the Lord of majesty appeared in the form of a man, and lightened the eternal darkness, and breaked the bonds that could not be loosed, and the succor of his everlasting might visited us that sat in the deep darkness of our transgressions and in the shadow of death of our sins.

When Hell and Death and their wicked ministers saw that, they were stricken with fear. They and their cruel officers, at the sight of the brightness of so great light in their own realm, seeing Christ of a sudden in their abode, and they cried out saying, “We are overcome by thee! Who art thou that art sent by the Lord for our confusion? Who art thou that without all damage of corruption and with the signs of thy majesty unblemished dost in wrath condemn our power? Who art thou that art so great and so small, both humble and exalted, both soldier and commander, a marvelous warrior in the shape of a bondsman, and a King of glory, dead and living, whom the cross bears slain upon it? Thou that didst lie dead in the sepulcher hast come down unto us living, and at thy death all creation quaked and all the stars were shaken, and thou hast become free among the dead and dost rout our legions. Who art thou that settest free the prisoners that are held bound by original sin and restores them into their former liberty? Who art thou that sheddest thy divine and bright light upon them that were blinded with the darkness of their sins?”

After this same manner, all the legions of devils were stricken with like fear and cried out all together in the terror of their confusion, saying, “Whence art thou, Jesus, a man so mighty and bright in majesty, so excellent without spot and clean from sin? For that world of earth, which hath been always subject unto us until now, and did pay tribute to our profit, hath never sent unto us a dead man like thee, nor ever dispatched such a gift unto hell. Who, then, art thou that so fearlessly enterest our borders, and not only fearest not our torments but besides essayest to bear away all men out of our bonds? Peradventure, thou art that Jesus of whom Satan, our prince, said that by the death of the cross thou shouldst receive the dominion of the whole world.”

Then did the King of glory in his majesty trample upon Death and laid hold on Satan the prince and delivered him unto the power of Hell, and drew Adam to him unto his own brightness.

And that is our show for today. Thank you for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you, either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but we can’t respond to everything. We do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: [Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and] fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much. God bless you, and may he give you a bright and glorious Pascha.